Colorado State University Pueblo is running at a $3.3 million deficit for the current fiscal year, which means as many as 50 jobs will be cut from the southern Colorado campus next year.

Colorado State University chancellor Michael Martin says the timing of this news has placed him and CSU-Pueblo president Lesley DiMare somewhere below the Grinch Who Stole Christmas and Ebenezer Scrooge in the eyes of the school’s faculty and staff.

However, there are times, Martin says, when even Santa Claus has to make some very tough decisions.

Officials say perhaps eight to 10 of the job cuts will be unoccupied positions that won’t be filled. Other cuts could be achieved by folding some nonacademic functions, such as human resources and purchasing, into the Fort Collins campus offices.

Leadership throughout the Pueblo campus has been asked to compile lists of nonessential personnel, and letters will be sent to staffers next month telling them there’s a chance they will be downsized. While the hope is to save as many jobs as possible, there’s the chance that some non-tenured faculty positions will be lost.

CSU Pueblo’s 2013-14 budget is about $45 million. The school has 750 full- and part-time employees.

The speed with which the decision is being made has some staffers baffled.

“It’s just so sudden, and from our perspective, we’re not sure why it’s even happening,” said Carol Loats, an associate history professor. “There are a number of faculty who are concerned that this isn’t really a budgetary situation and wonder if something else is going on.”

Loats says that’s based on part on the sense that over the past few years budgets for the school have seemingly been routinely passed without discussion.

But according to Martin, the reality is something different. For the past few years, he says the school has gotten by largely because of about $14 million it received in federal stimulus money in 2008, as well as being subsidized by the CSU system, which provided another $2 million to the school this year.

But Martin said the subsidies can’t continue, and with the stimulus money also gone, DiMare and the Pueblo administration have been scrambling for revenue sources.

Many Colorado schools facing financial shortfalls have tried to address the problem by raising tuition. CSU-Pueblo garnered praise last spring by being virtually the only university in the state to not raise tuition for 2013-14.

Martin said the move was a calculated risk on the part of the school: Officials hoped the lower cost would attract more students. Instead, it got hit with a double whammy — enrollment actually fell, depriving the school of new revenue, and the students already on campus didn’t help improve the bottom line like those at other schools by paying more than they did the previous year.

And while the university will benefit next year from its share of an increase in state funding from the legislature, Pueblo, like all the other schools in Colorado, will be limited to no more than a 6 percent tuition hike in 2015.

“We have to reduce the costs side of the ledger and look at long-term solutions,” Martin said. “This isn’t just us; it’s happening all over the country, and I applaud Lesley for doing what has to be done.”

Even if that’s the case, Loats said the timing amounts to getting a lump of coal in the stocking.

“The cycles that schools use to hire faculty means that most applications have to be submitted in December,” she said. “So that means it’s going to be hard for people who lose their job to get hired for next fall.”

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